TABLE OF CONTENTS Do you ever hear something that just rings so true, so substantial that it changes your whole perspective from that moment on? Such a moment happened to me in 1993 when I read the foreword to Peter Block s book: Stewardship43. The foreword was written by Joel Henning, and I ll paraphrase it as follows: we in the Western World have proclaimed victory with the demise of the totalitarian regime east of the Iron Curtain. Anyone could see that these drab grey societies exchanged their freedom in return for central control and supposed security for their citizens. Whatever their intentions, these drab grey societies strangled the human spirit, enfeebled hope, and created dependency in the general population. But in our smugness, we fail to see that this is precisely how we run our companies, our schools, and our public institutions: we run our organisations through central control, central planning and the offer of supposed security for our employees.
That struck a chord. It s almost as if most of our companies have an invisible sign nailed above their entrance saying: abandon democracy, all ye who enter here! Now I m not sure that democracy is an appropriate form of corporate governance: democracy is slow, wasteful, redundant, expensive, and inefficient. The antithesis of everything that good management stands for. And, as a friend of mine says: if you re in the middle of the road with a 16-wheeler bearing down on you, you don t form a committee . So there is a place for...
